Meta Question

How can you find questions that have been deleted from open viewing?

When a user’s account gets nuked for reasons other than their leaving on their own accord, their questions and offending responses get yanked along with their profile and login privileges. But apparently there is some way to still find their content. If you know the correct URL, the material is still there—hiding zombie-like in some dead zone. Is such “dead zone” content still visible to external search engines? And if not, what trick allows us to find deleted content on Fluther?

Say it was a discussion you were in, and you want to recapture some words you posted to it, ab answer someone else provided, or a link you failed to bookmark anywhere. What’s the secret key that opens the door to the zombie question hiding place?

@Seelix & @Rarebear In a recent instance when a user got the old heave-ho, I tried to find the thread looking at my responses. My response was gone from my response page too, even though I now know it is still accessible with the question’s URL. Another Jelly was nioce enough to send me the link to it.

@Mariah Thanks. In this instance I got no lurve for my answer, but Google lurved it. :-)

@talljasperman Thanks. That’s a thought. In the case that prompted me to ask this, though, it wasn’t the content of the question but the behavior of the person asking it that caused it to get sent to the zombie zone. Not knowing how egregiously this user was behaving towards others here, I was caught by surprise when it disappeared.

For example, here is a question someone gave me a GA for where my answer was not only modded, but the question was deleted. But I was able to find the question because of the GA (which is, come to think of it, the only thing I can think that I like about the whole lurve system).